Passage
by Valieara
Summary: “Never did like coming to the end of a good book, anyway,” she whispers once as if it’s meant to be a whisper, as if it’s a secret. Her light touch on his hands feels frail. Adama/Roslin through season four. Spoilers through Revelations.


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing, for fun not profit, etc.

**Spoilers/Setting:** Everything's fair game up to _Revelations._ Season four heavy, in particular.

**Notes: **Because, since I first started watching, I have been consistently struck by how gorgeous Laura is, and how unbelievably adorable she and Adama are. I am unrepentantly looking exclusively only at these two, because I love them so.

Yes, I am aware I've taken a few things nearly verbatim.

The word _passage_ can allude to whatever you want it to.

I would adore concrit if you would be willing to write it.

* * *

_Cry, Trojans, cry! Lend me ten thousand eyes_

_And I will fill them with prophetic tears._

_Troilus and Cressida_, Act II, Scene II, lines 101-2

* * *

In the lulls between attacks, Bill Adama sometimes imagines himself, at some undeterminable future point, telling a story to faceless children clustered about him on an alien floor: carpeted, not metal.

"Once upon a time," he begins, and ends.

There isn't all that much of a difference.

oOo

Despite the fact that she had returned _Dark Day_, likely without having had the time to read it, Adama had continued to lend Roslin books throughout her last weeks with the first round of cancer. He would have made gifts of them if she would have let him, but each time she staunchly refused, even as she was too weak to leave her bed more and more often.

It was an old rule of his, never lend books, but it was one he stuck by. He'd never lent out a book of his he liked and had it returned. He'd never given a book of his he didn't regret giving.

"No point," she'd said once, tersely, when he'd visited from Galactica, closing her eyes in pain and laying back in one of her huge recliners.

He'd supposed correctly that she'd been told she didn't have much time left.

"You're spoiling me, you know," she'd informed him, eyes bright. "I never got around to reading half of these. Even when I can get up to work I almost don't want to."

"Who else is going to read them?" Adama asked, settling opposite her. "I don't have the time, and there are few people I'd trust with them who'd want them."

"You're one of the last guardians of our culture," she said softly. "Literature, and art, and music – we have so very few of these things left, now."

He thought of the painting hanging in his quarters, and the ruins of the opera house on Kobol. The Arrow of Apollo, the Tomb of Athena; mythology made real, or reality made myth.

"The poet's job is to keep humanity true to itself," she ruminated, eyes distant and speculating. "Keep us true to who we are."

"Good thing I'm not a poet," Adama said, smiling ruefully.

She'd cocked her head and smiled faintly to herself.

oOo

After Laura had appeared at his hatch at the end of the first diloxin treatment, literally dead on her feet and asking if she could rest inside awhile, he'd made it a condition. He'd pushed her toward his rack where she collapsed and curled into a fetal position, unprotesting. He'd made a mental note to move his schedule around to accommodate hers.

Adama had been unable to do so today, and when he entered his quarters, he expected to find her in any state varying from slightly nauseous to passed out on the couch.

Her shoes by the couch indicated her presence. He followed soft murmurings into the bathroom.

She was leaning heavily against the sink, hand and fingers clawing loosely at the rim above her head. Her eyes were nervous and feverish. He moved her against the wall, wet a cloth and laid it across her forehead.

"Laura," he tried calling her out of it, and when that didn't work, "Madam President," sharp and commanding. She shook her head vaguely, and attempted to push him away.

The whole head smelled rancid, like a sickness. Around Laura, even half conscious and muttering, it smelled wrong.

The words pouring out of her mouth sounded like gibberish, and maybe they were; but Bill had always been wary of Laura and prophecy, and had never seen her after her self-termed visions. She'd believed in them, certainly, but it had never been enough to convince him to believe – to think it was anything other than the drugs she took, the influence of a priest and a friend, a growing cult determined to make her into a prophet, one reading too many of Pythia. Kneeling figures and fingers pressed to foreheads in respect and devotion, and Laura bewildered at the forefront.

President and prophet, teacher and leader. There was an unwitting balance to it.

It was enough to terrify him when she suddenly looked straight at him, through him, with an alarming clarity, all traces of her eyes' former unawares gone in their entirety.

He wondered what she saw; and pushed the thought to the back of his mind.

"Bad reaction to diloxin," Cottle diagnosed when he arrived, Laura having been guided to his rack once again, where she now lay, finally asleep. "Should've told her to keep off the chamalla; we had no idea how it was going to react with the diloxin. That was my fault."

He took out a cigarette and lit it. Adama said nothing. He'd long come to realize that people had their own ways of dealing with things, and it was better to let them have it.

"Watch her tonight – wake her every few hours if you can," Cottle advised. "And for frak's sake, keep her away from the chamalla after this."

oOo

Those who knew the Admiral would say he was reserved; a man of few words. This was true. Those that knew him well would adjust the statement to qualify it: if he had something to say, it was said with startling – and depending on his mood, nearly cruel – alacrity. He had never been known to soothe or coddle with his words, and unless he grew exponentially more sentimental in his old age, he likely never would.

The day had been a long string of truth after truth, and he didn't want to hear it anymore. Laura, her right wrist taped, waited inside his quarters looking as if the choices on the table were to work through the diloxin or vomit. He hoped she wouldn't talk.

She made him sit and took off her glasses, expectantly. He did so reluctantly; avoided the subject of Lee, and talked about Kara because he thought she might listen.

"She survived, for some reason, I can't explain it. Maybe it was…"

She was waiting for something. He watched her blink away fatigue in the silence.

"It was a what?" she taunted him darkly. "A _miracle_? Is that what you want to call this? Go ahead and say it. Grab your piece of the golden arrow, but I want to hear Admiral Atheist admit that a miracle happened."

He'd known precisely how to attack her since they'd returned from Kobol, had tucked strategy and arms away since in the hopes he would never have to use them; but now, in a fit of anger, he did. Her weak points were her death and her religion, and both were encapsulated by her threads of fraying belief. Attack her there, and she would crumble.

He left her alone in the room because he didn't want to watch it happen; and he didn't feel any remorse for it until he found ill-hidden clumps of her hair in the wastebasket, met her steely gaze and saw her shaking hands.

They didn't speak that night.

oOo

Sometimes Bill dreams himself in sickbay, sitting in a familiar seat and reading from a familiar book while Laura, bald and shrunken, recedes unwillingly into the banality of the hospital bedding. She watches him carefully; or sleeps and is unaware.

"Once upon a time," he begins, and ends; and she smiles to hear it.

"Never did like coming to the end of a good book, anyway," she whispers once as if it's meant to be a whisper, as if it's a secret. Her light touch on his hands feels frail.

"Have to agree with you there," he says, smiling for her eyes.

oOo

It took him the night to realize the weight of her statement, mathematical absurdities and schoolteacher presidents, to realize she didn't believe in miracles anymore. Bill, who never had, wondered what made that particular belief cave in after all this time. To him, it felt like a resignation, an acceptance of her death as close and inevitable; and the thought made his blood boil.

He read to her the next day during her fourth treatment, leaving Saul in charge of CIC while he ran his fingers over the spines of books he long hadn't had the time to read, though the inclination had never left. He settled on one, remembering she was fond of mysteries, resolving to speak through allegory and metaphor because there was no other way. Straight words were not an option.

He had once been told that the most important part of a written work was its opening paragraph; and reviewing the initial passage, he knew Laura would immediately catch on, would wonder how she was construed in his mind: if she was meant to be body or city.

Eyes still closed, and despite their unresolved argument of the night before, she smiled at his presence when he abruptly sat down and began to read:

"_I__t started like it always did: with a body. This one was in the river. I could tell she had once been beautiful, but this a bullet and fast current had taken away from her. All we are, all that we think we are, all that we are certain about is taken away from us. When you've worked the streets and seen what I've seen, you become more and more convinced of it every day._

"_Caprica City__ has been my teacher, my mistress. From the moment I open my eyes, she's in my blood, like cheap wine; bitter and sweet, tinged with regret. I'll never be free of her, nor do I want to be, for she is what I am. All that is, should always be."_

Laura made a small noise in the back of her throat, and blinked at the ceiling, still smiling. It was good to hear.

oOo

The first time Laura Roslin had informed him she had cancer, he already knew it.

"Fancies herself as a prophet," Saul had scoffed when he'd filled him in, but confirmed that yes, the president was dying. Kara was still AWOL. Lee had disappeared with the president and a third of the fleet after she'd broken out of jail.

Under an awning rigged by, he assumed, Lee and Kara, she hugged her arms close to herself and calmly confirmed what the entire fleet had known before him. Yes, she had cancer; yes, she had known when she'd taken the presidency; yes, she had a little less than six months to live.

At the time, he couldn't help but feel a little slighted. His own son had been one of the first she'd told. He and Roslin may not have been what one would describe as the best of friends before this, but for gods' sakes. Was the rift between military and government, between family, so incumbent?

No more, he'd already decided. No more.

He built a tentative friendship, with her surprised help, lent her books and held her hand on the harder days he was there to witness, left her with a smile and a promise extracted from her that he would see her tomorrow. She thought of herself as already dead. He did not.

The second time, he had no idea it was coming. Adama made his way to where Laura had stormed off, and was still pacing, likely irritated that she had lost her temper so easily. CIC was quiet, but everyone steadfastly ignored them.

"Laura?"

Her eyes on Kobol had been tired, but still sparkled with her indomitable spirit, knowing and determined. Now, they simply spoke of unending weariness.

She sighed heavily, and he smelled chamalla on her breath. "I'm out of remission."

oOo

She arrived at his door late one night, in a terrycloth bathrobe and a green scarf to keep her head warm.

More visions, she told him, assuring him she'd stayed away from chamalla and was still taking the generic painkillers. A boat on a river; she'd seen this woman, Emily, cross into the arms of her family, and had woken to find her dead. She'd seen her own, seen her mother.

"Bill, I don't know what to think, anymore," she admitted softly. "Emily had been listening to Baltar's broadcast nearly the entire time she was in sickbay. I heard it too. I don't know if this is just my subconscious, or…" her hands moved in exasperation at what she wasn't saying.

"If he's on to something?" he finished for her. "You're going to believe there's something in this horse manure that Baltar's been peddling?"

Laura sighed.

"I don't know. Something is happening, here, and I don't really understand it, Bill."

"I don't know. You both had the same dream. It means…" but he didn't know what it meant, and his mind was with Kara and Helo and Sharon and Gaeta. He'd never had an easy time defining faith.

"Bill, look at me," she commanded softly, and there was such strength in her voice he couldn't refuse her. Her gaze was promising and unrelenting. "I'm right here," she said. "Right here."

He admitted as much to her when she asked, hand on his back. Never believed in Earth. Hoped, maybe, though he'd never admitted it even to himself until this moment. It was a concept; an idea; locked away and surrounded by religion and prophecy and intangible things that could neither be proven nor disproven. It was, in short, up for grabs.

He'd grabbed. Laura'd believed. And nearly everyone followed, drawn to the strength of her belief and blinded by their own in a hope they could not touch or taste or see, but felt, viscerally, in their very bones. And if he hadn't, it wasn't his place to: it was his place to propagate a lie in order to propagate will. Will to live was everything. He hadn't had any outstanding hope, maybe; but he'd had his son. He'd had Kara. He'd had a purpose for being. It was all he'd needed.

He hadn't noticed how easy it was to gravitate toward this woman's strength, this woman's soul. Belief was simply a byproduct.

"What made you change?" she asked, a small, enigmatic smile creeping across her face, as though she already knew the answer.

"You."

She was only inches away, and so close, adorned by worry lines and crow's feet and headscarf, he'd thought she never looked more lovely.

oOo

Starbuck came to his quarters the first night Laura disappeared and admitted, with the same air she'd told him Zak should have failed Basic Flight, that the President had gone to the base ship because of something she, Starbuck, had told her the hybrid had said.

Adama knew Kara had never particularly liked the President on a personal level, and had on many occasions almost completely lost all respect for her, and he wondered what had driven her to seek Laura out in Life Station. The sixth treatment, he thought it had been. Gaeta had been there with her, leg recently amputated.

_My three wishes,_ he remembered Gaeta's voice, lilting sharp and clear throughout an otherwise silent sickbay; Laura, eyes closed and head in hands. There was a pervasive, unifying melancholy to it.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. That frakking hybrid; more trouble that it was worth.

"What was it saying?" he asked, rubbing his forehead.

"'The dying leader shall know the truth of the opera house'," Kara recited quietly, and after a moment stretched taut with silence, turned to leave.

"What do you hear, Starbuck?"

She paused. "Nothing but the rain."

He softened. "Get some sleep, Kara."

She straightened. "Yes, sir."

oOo

Sometime into the second month (it seemed like years) hobbling along together in space, Roslin had come to him with a hesitance masked by her confidence; and it was this internal conflict that made him hear her out. He'd liked to think he'd been pretty good at reading Laura Roslin's expressions and moods by that point, liked to think that she would never be anything less than honest with him.

He could still remember clearly, now – Laura had brought her copy of the sacred scrolls with her, opened to a passage from Pythia. Her eyes had been earnest over his table. She'd been having visions, she'd said. The Arrow of Apollo, the Tomb of Athena. Myth made reality. He'd wished he wasn't hearing this from her.

Eyes hard, she agreed to let it go. The next day, Kara called him on Earth's nonexistence, and jumped away in the raider she'd captured. It wasn't difficult to put two and two together, and Adama, always quick in his temper, was quick to declare Roslin's presidency terminated. He saw her behind Galactica's brig before he took two shots to his chest.

He'd woken from his coma a week later to find the fleet broken, rioting, and unguarded. _Loyalty, loyalty_, his rage thundered through him like a living thing those first few days, coming out of a mangled press conference and listening to the CAP's radio chatter. Everything, everyone was on an uprising, and although he knew loyalty out of necessity _could not_ be blind, he would not suffer mutiny onboard his ship.

But Dee raged back at him, insubordinate but uncaring, and he took it because he needed to hear it. Maybe Roslin was a delusional drug addict – and he wondered about that, how much of that statement, or the full blown rumor that she was a cancer patient, was truth – but no one had deserved the consequences of their fallout.

Those who didn't know him well would find it strange that he was not reluctant to apologize. Those who did knew already that there was little area for greys in either his military career or his personal life. Simplification was a matter of survival. He had been wrong. She had been right.

They'd met on Kobol at gunpoint. Lee relaxed into his embrace and returned it, fiercely; Kara's face crumpled as he tenderly stroked back her hair.

Roslin herself was a standing contradiction, wary and unguarded. He saw someone he could only identify as Laura, someone he'd seen only once before when he'd surprised her into dancing with him on Colonial Day.

"It's good to see you," he'd told her.

"Commander," she'd nodded to him from a distance.

oOo

He stayed behind for more than one reason, his daughter-in-law's words of two years before ringing in his memory. Family and fleet, fleet and family. There was little distinction, by this point. Laura was fleet and family, figurehead and woman, strength and home. A thousand things reminded him of her absence in his own quarters.

"I love you," she managed to choke out when the base ship made it back to the rendezvous, a first admission, her tentative grip around his shoulders growing tight with the certainty of her words. In that moment, in the bowels of an enemy ship, anything could have been true.

It was a feeling nearly unparalleled, this high of adrenaline, relief, and unbridled love. Adama thought of the births of Lee and Zak; of his wedding to Carolanne. It was a feeling that lasted all of ten minutes, and one that would not resurface for a long while.

The days that followed were a whirlwind he lost track of, with Laura a hostage and Saul a cylon. His son rocked him in his arms and whispered that everything would be alright, and in the distant background, Kara discovered a way to Earth.

Lee looked on worriedly as Laura, released after the truce was struck, entered the room, healing as she went with a simple touch to his arm and a few soft words.

"This is it, Bill," she said earnestly, beside him this time, her hand on his elbow. "This is everything we've been working for."

It was Laura, not the dying leader speaking; and in a whirl of excitement, everyone forgot about qualifications and modifiers.

The very same day, he stood on Earth, and wondered about the irony of prophecy.

oOo

"_I have sailed so long, and travelled so far, been granted passage over land and ocean. There comes a point time ceases to matter in any way but in the relativity of one thing to another. How could it, after all: when the days strung together merge into an indistinct mass, one indistinguishable from another; when all there is to look forward to is more of something that by its own nature is unpredictable, and never an end. If you stare at something too long, try to hold onto a singular moment, it turns to dust in your hands. _

"_I have sailed so long, and travelled so far; and if I try, I can still see her, a rainy day on the docks, though the expression on her face has long since been lost to my memory. _

"'_Goodbye, love,' she says, an unchanging melody, but my ears ache to hear differently."_

oOo

Adama dreamt that night of the attacks: for once, a specific horror of his past, rather than a vague horror to come made manifest by his subconscious. He saw his entire family (old, new, adopted) staring, stricken at the remains of Caprica City, bodies all around, and uncaring of the radiation seeping, settling in their bodies.

And there, alone, Laura sat apart by a bonfire, reading Pythia line by line with trembling fingers and hunched form, as centurions dragged faceless bodies to the fire. She rocked and murmured, the ashes flying across her face.

Adama thought he felt his lips shape words.

"The end."

He woke to a wasteland.


End file.
